@article {154152, title = {Identification of Distinct Rodent-Associated Adenovirus Lineages from Mixed-Use Landscape.}, journal = {Ecohealth}, year = {2025}, month = {2025 Feb 04}, abstract = {

Land-use change and increased human-livestock-wildlife interactions have generated numerous possibilities for viral spillover, demanding enhanced surveillance in biodiverse regions. We investigated adenovirus diversity in small mammals, an understudied host taxon, from a forest-plantation mosaic in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot. We observed high prevalence (up to 39.39\%) and identified five lineages of adenoviruses with unique mutations in the dominant small mammal species,\ Rattus satarae. These lineages significantly differed from other known murine adenoviruses (p-distance \> 25\%), indicating the likelihood of novel adenoviruses in this endemic small mammal and suggesting potential for unexplored DNA virus diversity in the region.

}, keywords = {DNA viruses; India; small mammals; surveillance.}, issn = {1612-9210}, doi = {10.1007/s10393-025-01700-6}, url = {https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39903359/}, author = {Ansil, B R and Sanyal, Avirup and Sreenivas, Darshan and Garg, Kritika M and Ramakrishnan, Uma and Chattopadhyay, Balaji} } @article {20349, title = {Impact of wild prey availability on livestock predation by snow leopards.}, journal = {R Soc Open Sci}, volume = {4}, year = {2017}, month = {2017 Jun}, pages = {170026}, abstract = {

An increasing proportion of the world{\textquoteright}s poor is rearing livestock today, and the global livestock population is growing. Livestock predation by large carnivores and their retaliatory killing is becoming an economic and conservation concern. A common recommendation for carnivore conservation and for reducing predation on livestock is to increase wild prey populations based on the assumption that the carnivores will consume this alternative food. Livestock predation, however, could either reduce or intensify with increases in wild prey depending on prey choice and trends in carnivore abundance. We show that the extent of livestock predation by the endangered snow leopard Panthera uncia intensifies with increases in the density of wild ungulate prey, and subsequently stabilizes. We found that snow leopard density, estimated at seven sites, was a positive linear function of the density of wild ungulates-the preferred prey-and showed no discernible relationship with livestock density. We also found that modelled livestock predation increased with livestock density. Our results suggest that snow leopard conservation would benefit from an increase in wild ungulates, but that would intensify the problem of livestock predation for pastoralists. The potential benefits of increased wild prey abundance in reducing livestock predation can be overwhelmed by a resultant increase in snow leopard populations. Snow leopard conservation efforts aimed at facilitating increases in wild prey must be accompanied by greater assistance for better livestock protection and offsetting the economic damage caused by carnivores.

}, issn = {2054-5703}, doi = {10.1098/rsos.170026}, author = {Suryawanshi, Kulbhushansingh R and Redpath, Stephen M and Bhatnagar, Yash Veer and Ramakrishnan, Uma and Chaturvedi, Vaibhav and Smout, Sophie C and Mishra, Charudutt} } @article {1001, title = {Islands within islands: two montane palaeo-endemic birds impacted by recent anthropogenic fragmentation.}, journal = {Mol Ecol}, volume = {24}, year = {2015}, month = {2015 Jul}, pages = {3572-84}, abstract = {

Anthropogenic habitat fragmentation of species that live in naturally patchy metapopulations such as mountaintops or sky islands experiences two levels of patchiness. Effects of such multilevel patchiness on species have rarely been examined. Metapopulation theory suggests that patchy habitats could have varied impacts on persistence, dependent on differential migration. It is not known whether montane endemic species, evolutionarily adapted to natural patchiness, are able to disperse between anthropogenic fragments at similar spatial scales as natural patches. We investigated historic and contemporary gene flow between natural and anthropogenic patches across the distribution range of a Western Ghats sky-island-endemic bird species complex. Data from 14 microsatellites for 218 individuals detected major genetic structuring by deep valleys, including one hitherto undescribed barrier. As expected, we found strong effects of historic genetic differentiation across natural patches, but not across anthropogenic fragments. Contrastingly, contemporary differentiation (D(PS)) was higher relative to historic differentiation (F(ST)) in anthropogenic fragments, despite the species{\textquoteright} ability to historically traverse shallow valleys. Simulations of recent isolation resulted in high D(PS)/F(ST) values, confirming recent isolation in Western Ghats anthropogenic fragments and also suggesting that this ratio can be used to identifying recent fragmentation in the context of historic connectedness. We suggest that in this landscape, in addition to natural patchiness affecting population connectivity, anthropogenic fragmentation additionally impacts connectivity, making anthropogenic fragments akin to islands within natural islands of montane habitat, a pattern that may be recovered in other sky-island systems.

}, keywords = {Animal Distribution, Animals, Computer Simulation, Conservation of Natural Resources, Ecosystem, Gene Flow, Genetic Variation, Genetics, Population, Geography, India, Microsatellite Repeats, Passeriformes, Phylogeography, Sequence Analysis, DNA}, issn = {1365-294X}, doi = {10.1111/mec.13266}, author = {Robin, V V and Gupta, Pooja and Thatte, Prachi and Ramakrishnan, Uma} }